David Armstrong was a core member - and probably the most discreet - of the Boston School photographers, developing a highly personal style. During the 1970s, he was associated with the “Boston School” of photography, composed of young photographers such as Jack Pierson, Philip-Lorca di Corcia, Mark Morrisroe, all graduates of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during the 1970s. With them and with artists such as his friend Nan Goldin, he shares the same themes, focused on their personal life, on the people they meet and live with, in the world of social outsiders of Boston then New York.

First known for his intimate snapshots portraits of male friends or lovers, he began photographing cityscapes and landscapes in soft focus in the 1990s, where cars, street lights and signs are sensually blurred, contrasting with the vividness and tactility of his portraits. A quiet and romantic intensity emerges from his photographs, in a hymn to beauty and instantaneity. His landscapes are of a familiar and transcendental world, his delicate portraits are a poem dedicated to the vulnerability of those he photographs. “ [I] wanted to make pictures that were simple, direct and accessible, about the relationship between myself, the sitter and the light.”

His relation to light, indeed, is one of the main component of his work. Light is always natural, unidirectional, and impregnating sitters and landscapes of a soft and benevolent coldness. Armstrong'svision is thus driven by his intuitive qualities, his penetrating gaze being guided by his sensations and desires. As a matter of fact, his photographs are marked by a deep ambivalence, speaking of both desire and despair, like the complex relationship between Eros and Thanatos. Overcoming this duality between desire and death, his photographs are quietly hopeful, expressing the hope of rescinding the constraints of our own world to enter a timeless realm, made only of beauty and sensuality. The title of his first book, ‘The Silver Cord’, from the Ecclesiast, is besides a reference to that need for a spiritual awakening before death. Thus, the artist seems obsessed by beauty and youth, as if they were barriers against death in his own search for spirit purity.

His intense portraits as well as his romantic and shadowy landscapes are characterized by a delicate harmony between obsession with beauty’s impermanence (could it be erotic or evanescent) and the sense of the timelessness of memory. Duality is emblematic of his work, where the familiar is made strange and the strange made deeply familiar. He thus renders the mystery of each landscape, transforming each place in a magical and nebulous realm. His landscapes are like metaphors of his spirit, floating in extended time and space, like a dreamlike subconscious.

Armstrong uses photography as a seductive device, a sublimation of his own desire, preserving the life and realness of his subjects, unvarnished and without dramatization, in the stillness of life between two actions. The simplicity and deepness of his portraits make them even more intense, the viewer being absorbed and snatched by their intensity. Each element is very subtle, and the projection of his desire is exceeded by his fascination for his sitters. He leaves them with a great freedom, and thus succeeds in catching their essence, revealing their profound identity. His art of simple gesture revealing the person shows a perfect balance between psychological and formal. For a long time, Armstrong preserved his work far from the public, protecting its complete integrity, and keeping the intimacy of his personal world for him and his friends only. His photographs, indeed, are a precious testimony of the intense love between his relatives and himself, between all these individuals he admires, and whose portraits are an ode to what they are and represent, despite the outsider tag society gave them.

David Armstrong was born in 1954 in Arlington, Massachusetts. He attended the Boston Museum School then studied in New York at the Cooper Union during the mid-1970’s. In 1983, he returned to Boston to teach art and resume his studies, and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University in 1988. After living in Europe for several years, he came back to New York in 1997. At the same time, his work gained more recognition, as he came to fashion photography, first commissioned by the young fashion designer Hedi Slimane to shoot backstage at a Dior catwalk in 2001. His photographs appeared in many magazines such as Vogue, and he realized numerous advertising campaigns until his death in 2014. Recently, his works have been exhibited in the Whitney Biennale (New York, 1995), Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, 1995), Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, 1998), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2003), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, 2015).

His works are in public institutions such as the Whitney Museum (New York), as well as the archives of many high-fashion magazines.